The Translator

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Kafka re-re-retranslated: the graphic novel Kafka in

English, German and Polish

Zofia Ziemann

To cite this article: Zofia Ziemann (2020) Kafka re-re-retranslated: the graphic novel Kafka in
English, German and Polish, The Translator, 26:1, 9-24, DOI: 10.1080/13556509.2019.1698493

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2019.1698493

Published online: 03 Jan 2020.

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THE TRANSLATOR
2020, VOL. 26, NO. 1, 9–24
https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2019.1698493

ARTICLE

Kafka re-re-retranslated: the graphic novel Kafka in English,

German and Polish
Zofia Ziemann
Independent scholar

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The paper analyses the graphic novel Kafka in its English original Graphic novel; translation;
and its German and Polish translations. Written by David Zane retranslation; multimodality;
Mairowitz and illustrated by Robert Crumb, the book offers an Kafka
account of Franz Kafka’s life and a discussion of his works, com-
bined with adaptations of his selected writings. It can be concep-
tualised as a retranslation on two levels: quotations from Kafka’s
works abounding in the graphic novel were retranslated into
English by the adaptor, and the book itself can be seen as a very
specific, alternative rewriting or retranslation of the cultural image
of Franz Kafka. The German translation of the graphic novel
involved back-translating Kafka quotes into their original language,
while the Polish edition used existing translations of his works; both
retranslated the author’s image for the respective target cultures.
The translators had to decide whether their loyalty lay with the
authors of the graphic novel or with the original author; both opted
for the latter, redeeming Mairowitz’s departures from Kafka’s text.
Employing the concept of retranslation, the paper seeks to unpack
the complex relationships between multiple source and target
texts, modes, authors, translators and readerships at play.

Graphic novel adaptation and/as/in retranslation

‘Repetition without replication, bringing together the comfort and ritual of recognition
with the delight of surprise and novelty’, and resulting in ‘inherently “palimpsestuous”’
texts (2006, 173, 6) – Linda Hutcheon’s classic definition of adaptation would arguably
strike a chord with many TS scholars researching new translations of works previously
translated into the same language (cf. Tahir Gürçağlar 2009). However, unlike the notion
of translation, which has been often used to conceptualise the relationship between
various intersemiotic adaptations, graphic novels included, and their (usually literary)
source texts, both in Adaptation Studies (e.g. Malone 2000; Simonetti 2011; Hermann
2016) and Translation Studies (Woods 2014, 191–299, Mälzer 2015; Jarniewicz 2018, cf.
Kaźmierczak 2018; Weissbrod, Kohn 2019, ch., 4), ‘retranslation’ is rarely evoked in this
context. One counterexample is a recent paper by Eker-Roditakis (2019), juxtaposing
retranslation, intersemiotic translation and adaptation (novel into film). Retranslations of
non-adapted comics have been discussed more often, e.g. by Zanettin (2014b [2008]) or
Borodo (2015).

CONTACT Zofia Ziemann zofia.z.ziemann@gmail.com Independent scholar

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
10 Z. ZIEMANN

This apparent absence of the notion of retranslation in studies on graphic novel

adaptations may have a practical reason: not many adaptations get retranslated in the
narrow sense of the word, i.e. have multiple versions in the same foreign language.
However, I would like to argue that this concept is still relevant, as graphic novel
adaptations of literary classics often partially retranslate their sources, modifying or
altogether replacing existing translations in the verbal layer of the multimodal target
text – be it for practical (availability, adaptability), financial (copyright fees) or interpretive
reasons, and their visual layer can likewise be seen as a retranslation of previous depic-
tions of the source text. Moreover, some adaptations can be conceptualised as active
retranslations (Pym 1998, 82) also on a higher level: their authors are aware of previous
rewritings (Lefevere 1992) of a particular source text (other adaptations, translations,
criticism), and deliberately distance themselves from them, sometimes polemically.
The complexity of multimodal texts invites the semiotic perspective, with its focus on
structure, intratextual intermodal relations, and the mechanisms of meaning creation;
indeed, this paradigm is strongly represented in discussions of multimodality and transla-
tion (e.g. Kaindl 2013; O’Sullivan 2013; cf. ‘resemiotisation’ in O’Hallaran, Tan and Wignell
2016). However, while in what follows I make a passing reference to the high priest of
semiology, Roland Barthes, my theoretical focus is different: I would like to situate my
discussion of multimodal material within the broader framework of contemporary retran-
slation research (e.g. Koskinen and Paolposki 2003, 2015; Berk Albachten, Tahir Gürçağlar
2019), informed by the Cultural Turn, Translation Sociology, and, more recently,
Translation History and Translator Studies. Taking into account aspects usually covered
in retranslation studies – the historical and cultural setting, paratexts, publishing and
institutional patronage, human agency and motivations, etc. – I follow Klaus Kaindl’s
remark on the relevance of social contexts for the study of comics translation, expressed
already twenty years ago (1999).
The text under discussion is the graphic novel1 Kafka, written by David Zane
Mairowitz and illustrated by Robert Crumb: a multimodal and multi-authorial palimp-
sest offering a biographical account of Franz Kafka’s life and an interpretation of his
works, intertwined with adaptations of some of his stories and excerpts from the
novels, alongside numerous quotes from his diaries and letters. Looking at the
English, German and Polish editions of this book, I hope to demonstrate that
retranslation research offers a useful theoretical perspective on graphic novel adap-
tations – both as target texts, i.e. results of the retranslation process, and as source
texts for further (re)translations. I will apply the notion of retranslation to construe
the book as Crumb’s and Mairowitz’s interpretation of Kafka’s life and work, under-
taken from a specific position and serving a particular cultural agenda, and to unpack
the complex relationships between multiple source and target texts, modes, authors,
translators and readerships.

The English Kafka (1993-)

The book was first published in 1993 as Kafka for Beginners, part of an illustrated non-
fiction series whose origins date back to the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative,
founded in the mid-70s in London. Originally, the series had a strongly leftist slant and
was devoted to major social rather than literary figures (including Lenin, Trotsky, Mao,
 THE TRANSLATOR 11

alongside Freud, Darwin, and Einstein), as well as socio-economic or political phenomena

(e.g. Capitalism for Beginners). Following the dissolution of the cooperative and the
ensuing copyright disputes among its American, Canadian and British co-founders, in
1991 one of them, Richard Appignanesi, reintroduced the Beginners series (later renamed
Introducing . . .) at Icon Books, a small press newly established in London. By then, with
many dozen titles to its name, the series had already become highly recognisable,
popular, and more commercially oriented than at the time of its conception; it has been
successfully continued to this day.
David Zane Mairowitz, a US-born author working mainly for the theatre and the radio,
met Appignanesi while living in London, where he was one of the founding editors of the
International Times, a major outlet for underground culture. In 1986, he wrote a Beginners
graphic novel about the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (illustrated by German Gonzalez). In
the early 1990s, the editor contacted him to discuss future titles, and that was how the idea
of Kafka originated. By then, Mairowitz had moved to the south of France, where his
neighbour was the American cartoonist and satirist Robert Crumb, a key figure in the
1960s underground comix movement (‘X-rated’ comics for adult readers), author of Fritz
the Cat and Mr Natural (cf. Guillaume 2015, 103). Knowing that Crumb was fascinated with
Franz Kafka, Mairowitz invited him to collaborate on the graphic novel (cf. Mairowitz 2013)2.
The 176-page book, which I will call the Kafka macro-text, is a formally complex
structure, indeed resembling a re/translation Chinese box. It contains, in roughly equal
proportions, Mairowitz commentary3 on Kafka’s life and work, illustrated by Crumb, and
the graphic adaptations of his selected writings: ‘The Judgement’, ‘The Metamorphosis’,
‘The Burrow’, ‘In the Penal Colony’, The Trial, The Castle, ‘A Hunger Artist’ and America. The
two components are intertwined very tightly, often co-existing on one page: usually (but
not consistently), Mairowitz’s commentary or paraphrase appears outside the panels, in a
regular printer’s font, while ‘Kafka’s text’ is hand-lettered into Crumb’s drawings, either in
bubbles or as box captions. Moreover, the arrangement of the adaptations is subject to
the macro-text’s narrative. Rather than following the chronology of Kafka’s writing, they
illustrate particular points made in the commentary. At times, even the integrity of a
single source text is disrupted: for example, the eight-page adaptation of The Trial (‘Before
the Law’ and the conclusion; Mairowitz, Crumb 2006 [1993]: 88–95, subsequent page
references are to this edition) is supplemented much later in the macro-text by another
four pages adapted from a different section of this novel (the sequence with Leni; pp.
129–132).
In both the commentary and the adaptations, the verbal layer was mediated by
Mairowitz: it involves his interlingual retranslation of excerpts from Kafka’s writing. The
adaptor read Kafka in German, so providing his own English translations seemed more
practical and ensured a more direct access to the ‘original’4; also, he found Willa and
Edwin Muirs’ versions from the 1930s and 40s inadequate (cf. Coetzee 1998; Woods 2014,
44–79). Nowhere in the text did he reference the existing English translations, a gesture
which seems to counter the aim of the series; if the graphic novel indeed encourages
English-speaking readers to reach for Kafka’s works, they need to find the translations
themselves. The source text titles are indicated in the case of adaptions from Kafka’s
fiction, but not in the commentary, where quotations are only marked with inverted
commas and/or italics, without bibliographical references.
12 Z. ZIEMANN

To make matters yet more complicated, the non-adapted commentary involves

Crumb’s intersemiotic translation (text into image) of Mairowitz’s narrative, while the
adaptations feature his intersemiotic translation of two English-language sources:
Mairowitz’s retranslation of the excerpts ultimately used in the book, and the Muirs’
translations of Kafka’s works5. This is because Crumb could only read Kafka in English:
his idea of the author’s work had emerged prior to the project, based on the published
translations, and was only secondarily and partially complemented by Mairowitz’s version.
Nevertheless, the visual and verbal modes are highly coherent, since the authors
collaborated on developing the narrative structure of the book and working out their
shared interpretation. Rather than Mairowitz’s storyboard being simply illustrated by
Crumb, or, conversely, Mairowitz weaving Crumb’s independently created artwork into
his text, the illustrator and the scripter worked in a feedback loop to make sure they were
‘on the same page’, to the extent that Crumb sometimes suggested changes in the text
(cf. Mairowitz 2019). Indeed, there is hardly a page in the book that would not feature
both text and image. Moreover, thanks to Crumb’s skill in detailing his characters’ facial
expressions, and thus emotions (eyes boggled in bewilderment, frowned brows, lips
curled in disgust), his seemingly simple, black-and-white illustrations in fact closely
correspond to the reading of Kafka’s biography and works proposed in the narrative;
rather than merely illustrating the plot (of Kafka’s stories or his life, as described by
Mairowitz), they convey the situational humour and interpersonal relations between
characters. Of course, ‘similarity’ or ‘correspondence’ is notoriously difficult to theorise
or demonstrate, much more so than difference; thus, suffice it to say that I have not
noticed any discrepancies between the text and image.
On the interpretive level, the graphic novel focuses on four interrelated aspects of
Kafka’s life and work: his Jewishness, his relationship with his father, his relationships with
women, and the humour in his works. This reading of Kafka was informed by the authors’
personal experiences and artistic interests. Crumb identified with Kafka, and his previous
work often explored his own neuroses, especially pertaining to women and sex.
Mairowitz, in turn, was disappointed by scholarly Kafkology, which he saw as offering
increasingly elaborate and esoteric interpretations while forgetting that Kafka was above
all else a storyteller, and a funny one at that. As an atheist Brooklyn-born Jew, Mairowitz
had a different approach to Kafka’s Jewishness: instead of seeking to decipher alleged
references to the Kabbalah, he saw manifestations of the writer’s background in his bitter,
self-deprecating humour:

My personal take on Kafka’s humour is that it harks back to traditional Jewish humour, which
has as its basis a kind of social revenge. Here the joke is always on oneself – no one in this
world can be more ridiculous than me – and please sit down and listen while I show you just
how foolish I am. This is survival humour, because in the end the message is always the same:
I may have sunk to the lower depths, but – and now the joke is on you – I’m still alive.
(Mairowitz 2014)

In the early 1990s, paying attention to the erotic and the humorous in Kafka’s work was
indeed a novel interpretive approach6. Creating this unorthodox image of Kafka also fit in
with the aim and format of the series; the graphic novel was meant to popularise the
author, using comic book framework to make his writings reader-friendly, accessible
especially to young adults intimidated by the bulk and reputed difficulty of his actual
 THE TRANSLATOR 13

works. Mairowitz half-jokingly refers to his original target reader as ‘a seventeen-year-old

in Oklahoma who won’t bother to read the real thing’.
By definition, any ‘Kafka extract’ would of course be a manipulation (in the descriptive, non-
judgemental sense of the word, cf. Hermans 1985; Lefevere 1992). In the case of Mairowitz and
Crumb, it was an informed manipulative rewriting, reframing or retranslation: due to their
countercultural background and artistic individuality, the adaptation was a strong interpretive
gesture, not just encouraging its addressees to read Kafka, but showing them how to read
him. Moreover, the authors did not limit themselves to giving Kafka their vision and voice by
selecting, re/translating and commenting on his work – already a very wide spectrum of
rewriting practices, ensuring control over the interpretation. Quite surprisingly, given the
intended readership and the technical constraints of the book, they also devoted some space
to overt polemics with existing interpretations, including other adaptations (cf. Malone 2000,
179–180), hence my contention that their work resembles a retranslation.
Mairowitz makes his approach clear in the opening pages:

[Kafka] had no discernible World-View to share in his works, no guiding philosophy, only
dazzling tales to deliver out of an extraordinarily acute subconscious. . . . No writer of our time,
and probably none since Shakespeare, has been so widely over-interpreted and pigeon-
holed. . . . [Kafkaesque] is an adjective that takes on almost mythic proportions in our time,
irrevocably tied to fantasies of doom and gloom, ignoring the intricate Jewish Joke that
weaves itself through the bulk of Kafka’s work. (p. 5)

Discussing Kafka’s afterlife in the conclusion, he ironises:

One recent film [Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 Kafka – ZZ], which has the indecency to bear his
name in the title, has him entering the Castle and performing lobotomies in the interest of
mastering the world. . . .

There is now a literary science called ‘Kafkalogy’ [sic], and professors who vaunt themselves as
‘Kafkalogists’. The literature ABOUT Kafka alone runs into thousands of volumes. A lot of it
tells about his search for God and meaning in an Absurd universe, or the search for
individuality in the Age of Bureaucracy. One American psychologist, ascribing every concei-
vable sexual fantasy to Kafka . . . interprets the Door of the Law in The Trial as the unattainable
entry to Mother Kafka’s vaginal canal. (p. 157)

Mairowitz speaks here from the position of authority; it is up to him to decide which
interpretations are laughable, and which make sense. Of the ‘thousands of volumes’, he
mentions several worth reading: Elias Canetti’s Kafka’s Other Trial (1974 [1969]), Ernst
Pawel’s The Nightmare of Reason (1984), Pietro Citati’s Kafka (1987), Ritchie Robertson’s
Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature (1985), and Marthe Robert’s ‘excellent work on the
author’s relationship to Prague’ (presumably in her 1979 biography Seul, comme Franz
Kafka). Other than that, he firmly positions himself against academic readings, claiming:
‘the first and best of all “Kafkalogists” is . . . Franz Kafka. Nearly everything that has been
said or written about him can be found in his famous “Letter to His Father”’ (p. 158).
Ironically, this statement is followed by Mairowitz’s and Crumb’s two-page interpretation
of Kafka’s fifty-page text. Thus, it can be said that the authors’ retranslation of Kafka’s
works (into English and into illustrations) serve the higher purpose of retranslating his
image in contemporary culture.
The visibility of Crumb and Mairowitz manifests itself in both the book’s bibliographical
data (after all, Kafka figures as the title, not the author of the book; one edition quite
14 Z. ZIEMANN

accurately calls it R. Crumb’s Kafka. Text by David Zane Mairowitz) and between the covers.
The commentary is written in a tone that does not seek to be transparent; there are many
visual markers of irony and/or emphasis: capitalisations, italics, inverted commas. Also in
this sense, the verbal and the visual layer go together: just as Crumb has his individual
style of drawing, so does Mairowitz show his personality in writing. Towards the end,
where, with anti-capitalist gusto, the authors mock the commodification of the literary
giant turned tourist attraction (‘Soon, like Mozart in Salzburg, you’ll be able to eat his face
on chocolate’, p. 165), the book features Crumb’s portrait of the two of them against the
backdrop of Prague’s Old Town (Figure 1) – a clear sign of who is the real tale-teller here.
(Auto)ironically, while the authors of Kafka are grinning, the now-iconic face of Franz
Kafka on their T-shirts has a rather sombre expression.
Mairowitz’s and Crumb’s bold take on Kafka has proved immensely successful, with
several English editions, and translations into Japanese, Italian (1994), Spanish,
Norwegian, Korean, Finnish, German (1995), French, Turkish, Chinese (1996), Danish
(1997), Swedish (1998), Croatian (2001), Czech, Russian (2004), Dutch (2005) and
Portuguese (2006); some of these language versions also had multiple editions. ‘I continue
to be amazed at how much mileage this book has gotten over the years’, Crumb recently
wrote to Mairowitz (personal correspondence 2019)7. In the following section, I will very
briefly look at two of the many translations: the German one, which returns Franz Kafka’s
text to its original language, and the Polish one, which I authored.

Figure 1. Panel from Kafka (p. 165): Mairowitz (left) and Crumb (right).
Reprinted by permission of the authors.
 THE TRANSLATOR 15

The German Kafka (1995)

Kafka Kurz und Knapp [Kafka in a nutshell] was brought out two years after the English
edition by Zweitausendeins, a press founded in 1969 in Frankfurt and originally associated
with alternative culture (in the 1970s, it published German translations of Crumb’s
comics). By the 1990s, it became a well-established publisher of original and translated
fiction, non-fiction and art books. Given this profile and the fact that Kafka was more
present in German-speaking than English-speaking cultures, the focus of the publication
seems to have shifted towards readers familiar with his works but willing to see them in a
new light. Although Mairowitz could have self-translated the book, the job was commis-
sioned to his acquaintance Ursula Grützmacher-Tabori, writer, cinematographer and
translator of the acclaimed Hungarian-born author and theatre director George Tabori,
whose affinity for Jewish black humour and the grotesque was not unlike Crumb’s and
Mairowitz’s approach. Her task involved translating Mairowitz and back-translating Kafka
into German within the framework of the macro-text, and thus retranslating his image to
supplement the German interpretative tradition (it is quite telling that none of the above-
listed Kafka biographies recommended by Mairowitz were by German authors).
A comparative analysis of Kafka for Beginners and Kafka Kurz und Knapp reveals that
this process was less straightforward than it might seem. Apart from correcting a
minor factual mistake (wrong date of birth of a historical figure) and a case of obvious
mistranslation (in a quotation from Kafka’s letter, Mairowitz misread the German ‘also’
[so, hence, thus] in ‘Schreiben ist ein tieferer Schlaf, also Tod’ as ‘als’ [than], rendering
the passage as ‘writing is a deeper sleep than death’, rather than ‘hence death’; p. 73),
Grützmacher-Tabori had to decide what to do about Kafka quotations which proved
unidentifiable due to lack of references.
One such example of Mairowitz’s English translation of Kafka that does not seem to
have a German source text is the expression ‘Sex is a disease of the instincts’ (p. 38),
appearing in a thought bubble in quotation marks alongside a quote from Kafka’s diary.
Although in theory Grützmacher-Tabori could have translated the short phrase from
English into German herself, she was not willing to risk that it would sound different
than in Kafka’s unidentified original source, since Mairowitz could have taken the quota-
tion from reference literature rather than directly from Kafka, and/or mistranslated it.
Unable to provide the original quote, the German translator replaced the phrase with a
similar one from the diary, which, however, resulted in a typographically odd solution
(Figure 2). The thought bubble in the German edition reads: ‘Sexualität is die “Sehnsucht
nach Schmutz”’ [Sexuality is ‘a longing for filth’], with the beginning of the sentence,
added by Tabori, outside the inverted commas, and the direct quote inside – as though
Franz Kafka was consciously quoting himself.
Grützmacher-Tabori also identified a case where Mairowitz – whether deliberately or
by mistake – misattributed a quotation, presenting Kafka’s words as coming from Milena
Jesenska’s letter. The original panel (Figure 3) is an exchange between the two lovers, with
quotations in speech bubbles. In fact, both sentences come from Kafka’s letters, in reverse
chronological order: from 26th August and 9th August, respectively. The German trans-
lator replaced the falsely attributed reply with an excerpt from Milena’s letter to Max Brod,
also modifying the narrator’s framing words: ‘Später schrieb Sie an Max Brod: “Ich glaube
eher, dass wir alle, die ganze Welt und alle Menschen krank sind und er der einzige
16 Z. ZIEMANN

Figure 2. Panel from Kafka Kurz und Knapp (Mairowitz, Crumb 1995, 40).
Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Gesunde und richtig Auffassende”’. [She later wrote to Max Brod: ‘I rather think that all of
us, the whole world and all people, are ill, and he is the only sane and clear-sighted one'].
Understandable as it is, Grützmacher-Tabori’s solution resulted in the panel making little
sense, as the two quotations no longer form a dialogue, and a third person is suddenly
introduced, disrupting the intimacy of the exchange.
Also the quotations that were identified proved problematic for back-translation into
German. In the English version, ellipses are marked irregularly; even seemingly non-
elliptical quotations have sometimes been edited. Grützmacher-Tabori decided to restore
them in full form. An example can be found on the very first page, in a quotation from
Kafka’s diary. The English version is 173 characters long (incl. spaces): ‘The image of a wide
pork butcher’s knife, swiftly and with mechanical regularity chopping into me, shaving off
razor-thin slices which fly about due to the speed of the work’, the German has 241
characters, which makes it almost 40% longer: ‘Immerfort die Vorstellung eines breiten
 THE TRANSLATOR 17

Figure 3. Panel from Kafka (p. 105). Reprinted by permission of the authors.
18 Z. ZIEMANN

Selchermessers, das eiligst und mit mechanischer Regelmässigkeit von der Seite in mich
hineinfährt und ganz dünne Querschnitte losschneidet, die bei der schnellen Arbeit fast
eingerollt davonfliegen’ (the underlined phrases are omitted by Mairowitz).
Mairowitz’s cuts are minor and arguably insignificant (more significant is his emphasis on
the unkosher ‘pork’; I will return to this below), yet the German translator, unlike the adaptor,
probably considered it inappropriate to edit the great writer’s work, and/or feared criticism
from Kafkologists. Working with the German audience in mind, she was not willing to share
Mairowitz’s irreverence towards Kafka himself, not just towards academia: in other words,
she prioritised back-translating Kafka over translating Mairowitz and Crumb.
This approach of rectifying Mairowitz’s cuts was coupled with the objective difference
between the average word length in English and German; even in passages not edited by
Mairowitz, the German version is longer, resulting in added lines (e.g. 7 vs 5.5 on p. 29)
and/or an increased number of characters per line (e.g. 19 vs 29, 21 vs 30, 23 vs 30 etc. on
p. 41). The bubbles and boxes form an integral part of Crumb’s illustrations and could not
be enlarged without distorting the drawings; as a result, not only the verbal content, but
also the visual aspect of the graphic novel changed: longer German quotations had to be
inscribed into frames drawn with the shorter, English version in mind. Thus, on both the
level of content (more faithful renderings of Kafka: his actual words) and form (more text
vis-a-vis the same number and size of illustrations), in German the graphic novel subtly
but noticeably shifted from the comic end of the genre spectrum towards a reference
work.

The Polish Kafka (2019)

I shared the German translator’s concerns when preparing the Polish version of the book for
słowo/obraz terytoria, a prestigious publishing house founded in 1995, specialising in literary
criticism, media studies and philosophy, and known for high-quality productions (from cover
design and layout to binding and paper). Although the press published a two-volume cultural
history of comics (Szyłak 1999), it had never specialised in comics or graphic novels. In the case
of Kafka, again, personal relations came into play: Mairowitz met the literary scholar Stanisław
Rosiek, founder and director of słowo/obraz terytoria, through his Polish wife. Although the
contract was signed in 2015, due to financial difficulties the book came out only in 2019, with
the support from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (Culture Promotion
Fund). Both the publisher’s profile and, even more so, the time of the publication resulted in a
major shift in the target readership in comparison to the original English edition from a
quarter-century before. In the age of Wikipedia, SparkNotes and other free online cribs, no
student would buy a graphic novel just to acquaint him- or herself with a canonical author; the
Polish edition is rather intended for fans of Robert Crumb’s art and readers of Kafka.
Accordingly, it is the only hardcover among the editions discussed here, and the only version
which includes a list of sources (existing Polish translations).
Although formally I was commissioned to translate Mairowitz and Crumb from English
into Polish, I was also retranslating Kafka from German into Polish to provide the readers
with both ‘the comfort and ritual of recognition’ and ‘the delight of surprise and novelty’.
On the practical level, the German edition of Kafka proved invaluable, since it allowed me
to easily locate the sources of original quotations online and find their Polish equivalents
in existing translations. Thus, I was in fact working from three languages: from two macro-
 THE TRANSLATOR 19

source texts, i.e. the English and German versions of the graphic novel, and a number of
micro-source texts, i.e. the Polish translations of Kafka’s works. Since I found them
accurate, usually there was no need to retranslate Kafka in the narrow linguistic sense
of the word8. If I made minor adjustments, it was for reasons related to the multimodality
of the macro-text.
I slightly edited some quotations, especially dialogues, with the spatial constraints in
mind. Interestingly, my editor, Piotr Sitkiewicz, reintroduced most missing phrases in the
proofs (in some instances, I then re-negotiated the edits); this confirms the above remark
that the publisher sees Kafka readers, and perhaps even Kafka scholars, as the target of the
graphic novel adaptation, and thus wants to make sure the quotations from existing
Polish translations are reproduced without changes. For the same reason, in the case of
unidentified quotes, I followed Grützmacher-Tabori’s solutions, preferring to stay faithful
to Kafka, rather than introducing into the book sentences which might turn out to be
Mairowitz’s inventions.
At the same time, wherever possible I tried to minimise the incongruities between text
and image resulting from accuracy with respect to Kafka rather than to Mairowitz. In the
case of ‘the disease of the instincts’, I opted for a shortened version, ‘Tęsknota za brudem’
[Sehnsucht nach Schmutz/longing for filth], without the introductory ‘Sexuality is’, to
avoid the oddity of a partial quotation within thought bubble. In the opening quotation
with the vision of self-destruction, I adapted the Polish translation to match Crumb’s
illustration, while keeping down the length of the Polish version (172 to the English 173
characters), despite the average word length in Polish being higher than in English
(although not as high as in German). Mairowitz translated ‘breiter Selchermesser’ as ‘a
wide pork butcher’s knife’, emphasising unkosherness, while the existing Polish transla-
tion accurately rendered the German as ‘szeroki nóż do wędlin’ [a wide knife for cured
meats]. However, I decided against using this version, since Crumb drew what is unmis-
takably a cleaver or chopping knife, a utensil no Polish speaker would normally describe
with the generic noun ‘nóż’ [knife]. To avoid a linguistic item incongruous with the
illustration, I opted for ‘tasak’ [cleaver], departing from both the German original and
the previous Polish translation. I did not, however, add the Polish equivalent of ‘pork’ as a
qualifier: it would be too long, it was not enforced by the image, and I considered it
Mairowitz’s overinterpretation of Kafka, assuming the role of the adaptor’s censor, or
Kafka’s retranslator rather than Mairowitz’s translator.
The above example shows negotiating between conflicting loyalties – to the original
author and to the adaptor, who was in a sense my original author – and the role of the
images in this process. Contrary to most theorisations of the text-image relationship,
drawing on Roland Barthes’ influential ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, where the text anchors ‘the
floating chain of signifiers’ of the polysemous image (Barthes 1977, 39), this is a case of
‘reverse anchoring’; it is the image that fixes the text. In this sense, my work on Kafka can
be described using the much-criticised notion of ‘constrained translation’ (Kaindl 2013,
260; Zanettin 2014a [2008], 20–21) or indeed ‘constrained retranslation’ – not because
non-verbal elements are an obstacle by definition, but because, in this case, unlike the
text, they are non-negotiable (non-editable). The constraint is double: coming from the
image (resulting from multimodality) and from the source of adaptation (resulting from
the text being a retranslation of a canonical author). While Mairowitz’s text is slightly
revised in excerpts passing for Kafka’s own words (not in the adaptor’s commentary), but
20 Z. ZIEMANN

not to the point of breaking their correspondence with the image, Crumb’s illustrations
carry the original interpretive load.
The Polish editor and publisher supported my toning down of Mairowitz’s take on the
author of The Trial; however, this resulted from Kafka’s status and the intended Polish
readership, rather than from a reluctance to embrace the American authors’ unorthodox
approach. In fact, it seems that while the Polish producers of the book felt obliged to
intervene at the verbal level, they happily let Crumb’s images speak for both authors’ creative
depiction of Kafka. This is suggested by the choice of the cover illustration for the Polish
edition, which represents the content of the book more accurately and uncompromisingly
than in the previous English and German editions (see Figures 4 and 5 for comparison).
The original English edition masked the content – controversial and highly innovative
in its time – with a realistic oil portrait of Kafka by Crumb, very different in style and (near
lack of) expression from the drawings inside the book; the 2006 version used a coloured
reproduction of a black-and-white image from the book (p. 125), on the one hand
corresponding to the comic-book format of the series, on the other, playing with a well-
known if not cliched reading of Kafka’s protagonist as ‘man lost in a labyrinth’. Both
German editions, with an elegant greyscale palette suggesting a change of readership
from young adults to Kafka connoisseurs, reproduced Crumb’s illustrations, but selected
realistic ones. The Polish version, in turn, uses Kafka’s portrait seemingly similar to the
2013 German edition, but definitely less realistic, with spirals in the eyes; in the book, this
illustration accompanies Mairowitz’s remark that for the writer ‘the only solution [to not
being able to find peace living with his parents and sisters] was a kind of self-hypnosis or
“interior emigration” which simultaneously cut him off from the world and allowed him to
take it all in’ (p. 73). The addition of a funny-looking mole (the animal narrator of ‘The
Burrow’, p. 57), peering across Kafka’s shoulder, adds a slightly absurd, humorous touch,
suggested also in the newer German editions’ motif of beetle/cockroach legs. Thus,
between the 1990s and mid-2000s on the one hand, and the second decade of the
twenty-first century on the other, in terms of cover paratext there is a noticeable

Figure 4. Covers of the original 1993 English edition and the 2006 English edition.
 THE TRANSLATOR 21

Figure 5. Covers of the two German editions: 1995 (Zweitausendeins) and 2013 (Reprodukt), and the
Polish edition (2019).

difference in the presentation of both Kafka as an author and Kafka the book, reflecting
increased openness towards unorthodox interpretations, i.e. a changing norm.

Conclusion
A comprehensive analysis of even one language edition of Kafka would require more space;
here, I was only able to highlight selected aspects of the three versions, hoping to show that
the concept of retranslation may help understand the complex relationship between the
multiple texts and human agents involved. It seems that just as Mairowitz and Crumb aimed
to defend Kafka from ‘the Kafkaesque’ and Kafkologists, their German and Polish translators
and editors felt obliged to defend Kafka from the adaptors, feeling responsible for retran-
slating the German author no less than for translating Crumb and Mairowitz. As usually in
the case of retranslation, a major role was played by the cultural context (Kafka’s status in
the respective cultures at a particular time), publishers’ policies (intended target reader-
ships), and re/translators’ personal backgrounds, interests and motivations. As I hope to
have demonstrated, at least in the case of graphic novel adaptations, the concept of
retranslation, originally theorised with respect to monomodal texts, may successfully com-
plement the semiotic perspective on multimodality, contributing to both the intratextual
analysis and to broader discussions on the role of social, cultural and human factors in the
translation of multimodal material.

Notes
1. Aware that the term, introduced in the US in the 1970s in order to enhance the status of
book-length single-plot comics by distinguishing them from comic strips published in
periodicals, is contested by some scholars (cf. Labio 2011) and many representatives of
the comic book community (e.g. Campbell 2007) as a snobbish euphemism, I use it here
following the authors of Kafka. Despite not being universally accepted as a genre in its own
right, the graphic novel has been discussed as such in a number of interesting works (book-
22 Z. ZIEMANN

length studies include Baskind, Omer-Sherman 2008; Tabachnik 2009, 2014; King, Page
2017); the problem of translating (non-adapted) graphic novels has been addressed in
Guillaume (2015).
2. Unless otherwise indicated, contextual information on Kafka comes from my conversations
with Mairowitz, who is married to my mother, the Polish artist and journalist Małgorzata
Żerwe. My role as the Polish translator of Kafka stems from this personal relation, which does
not mean, however, that I am uncritical of the author. On the contrary, I would like to suggest
that the closer the relationship with the author, the more willing the translator is to suggest
revisions – a topic worth researching by translation sociologists or psycho-sociologists. I am
deeply grateful to David for his help in preparing this article, and I hope that my academic
scrutiny of his work will not be taken personally.
3. I deliberately avoid calling it a ‘paratext’ (framing Franz Kafka’s ‘text’), since this would
suggest that the adaptations themselves constitute a more prominent part of the macro-
text than Mairowitz’s narrative, which is not the case.
4. The inverted commas refer to the complicated editing and publishing history of Kafka’s
writings (cf. Malone 2000: 178–179).
5. Nothing in Crumb’s artwork suggests that he treated previous visual adaptations of Kafka’s
life and/or work as a point of reference, whether positive or negative; if he had, his work could
be conceptualised as an interesmiotic retranslation.
6. On the other hand, Mairowitz was not the first to criticise Kafkology. Although he does not
reference Milan Kundera’s (1991) article in the Times Literary Supplement, he might have been
inspired by it. The subtitle of that piece, ‘Rescuing Kafka from the Kafkologists’, seems echoed
in Mairowitz’s statement: ‘I have made it a personal crusade to defend Franz Kafka against the
adjective “Kafkaesque”’ (Mairowitz 2014).
7. After Kafka, Crumb returned to creating original comic books, with the notable exception of an
illustrated version of the Book of Genesis (2009, cf. Guillaume 2015, 103–104). Mairowitz
continued his adventure with the graphic novel, collaborating with various graphic artists. He
wrote a book on Albert Camus (1998, for Icon’s Introducing . . . series), adapted The Trial (2008)
and The Castle (2013), as well as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (2008), Dickens’s A Tale of
Two Cities (2010), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2010), and Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (2014). He also
explored Kafka through other media: together with Małgorzata Żerwe, he curated a multimodal
travelling art exhibition K: KafKa in KomiKs, featuring illustrations by his collaborators: Crumb,
Chantal Montellier (The Trial) and Jaromír 99 (The Castle), and created an ‘acoustic comic’ for the
radio (Kafka Unchained, produced in English, German and Polish language versions).
8. I would not have accepted the job if I did not know German and could not assess the quality
of the Polish translations, and the extent of Mairowitz’s changes to the German original. A
note from the Polish translator of Mairowitz’s adaptation of The Castle (published in 2014 by
Centrala, a press specialising in comic books) reveals a radically different approach. Hubert
Brychczyński explains that he did not use or even read the existing Polish translation due to
copyright protection, nor does he mention consulting the German original; he says that, apart
from Mairowitz’s retranslation, he read Anthea Bell’s English translation. Thus, his Polish
version is an indirect passive retranslation, a solution which would be unthinkable in the
more academically oriented Polish edition of Kafka.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Zofia Ziemann is a freelance translator, interpreter, editor, and researcher. She is a PhD graduate
(awaiting her viva) at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, where she teaches translation at the
 THE TRANSLATOR 23

Centre for Translation Studies. Her research interests focus on the history of literary translation, in
particular retranslation and reception. She has published papers in Polishand English in journals and
edited volumes. Member of EST and IATIS, she is also the managing editor of Przekładaniec: A
Journal of Translation Studies.

ORCID
Zofia Ziemann http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3549-1367

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